Senator John McCain (R-AZ) spoke at the Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing with Commanding General of the Multi-National Force in Iraq General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker on September 11, 2007. ” ‘The American people are saddened, frustrated, and angry over our past failures in Iraq,’ he said. ‘I, too, have been made sick at heart by the terrible price we’ve paid for nearly four years of mismanaged war. Some of us from the beginning have warned against the [former Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld strategy of too few troops, insufficient resources, and a plan predicated on hope rather than on the difficult business of stabilization and counterinsurgency.’ Now, he asserted, we were finally ‘getting it right, because we finally have in place a strategy that can succeed.’ ”
– Thomas E. Ricks, The Gamble, Page 248